Sperling's rags-to-riches life is the stuff of an American fable. He was born in the Missouri Ozarks in a cabin that already housed a family of six. His mother was overbearing. His father habitually beat him. In his autobiography, Rebel With a Cause (Wiley, 2000), he recalls that when his father died, "I could hardly contain my joy." Sperling got pneumonia at the age of seven, and doctors used just a local anesthetic when they sawed out a piece of a rib and drained pus from an infected lung. He spent the next six months in bed. The experience left him with a lifelong aversion to boredom. "I learned nothing from my childhood," he muses. "Except that it's a mean world out there, and you've got to bite and scratch to get by."
Years later, Sperling discovered that he was dyslexic. He prints everything -- except for his signature, which he inks in a wobbly cursive script. When he graduated from high school, he could barely read. His real education began when he joined the merchant marine and took a job in a freighter's engine room. Once at sea, he met several older, well-educated crewmen who shared their personal libraries. Sailing between Japan and Shanghai, Panama and New York, he devoured such classics as Notes from Underground and The Great Gatsby. Many of the ship's crew members were socialists -- some were Trotskyites and Stalinists -- and they introduced him to a leftist ideological culture. He remains an unabashed liberal who delights in challenging the status quo.
After two years at sea, he left the merchant marine and paid his tuition at Portland, Oregon's Reed College by working the swing shift in a Columbia River shipyard. Lacking family connections or any notion of how to make his way in the business world, he fell into academe. "It was the path of least resistance," he says. He earned a PhD from Cambridge University and became a tenured humanities professor at San Jose State University. Professor Scott Rice describes Sperling's time at the school in less-than-charitable terms. "Teaching was all right, but I'm an activist," Sperling concedes. The passive life just didn't appeal to me."
It was at San Jose State that he discovered his first true calling: union organizing. He joined the local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and rose to state and national positions of leadership during the next 10 years. But then he overplayed his hand. In 1968, he persuaded the leaders of the AFT at San Jose State to mount a sympathy strike with professors at San Francisco State University. After 31 days of picketing, 100 professors narrowly averted a mass firing, and the strike unraveled. As for Sperling, he lost his credibility as a leader and became the most reviled man on campus. Still, the humiliating defeat delivered an invaluable lesson.
"The strike was one of the most liberating experiences of my life," he says. He found that "it didn't make a goddamn bit of difference what people thought of me. Without that psychological immunity, it would have been impossible to create and protect the University of Phoenix from hostility, legal assaults, and attempts to legislate us out of existence." He does not recommend this behavior to others. ("You don't get anywhere in an organization if you're utterly indifferent to how people feel about you," he says.) But for him, it worked. The experience steeled him for the life of an entrepreneur.
Sperling dislikes the goal-oriented mind-set that drives many businesspeople. "If you have a goal, you're constrained by that goal," he says. "You should never delude yourself into thinking that you know exactly where you're going." By the early 1970s, Sperling's academic career was going nowhere. But while he didn't know it at the time, he was about to embark on a life-changing journey into the world of business.
In 1972, he was chosen to run a series of workshops at San Jose State that would prepare police officers and teachers to work with juvenile delinquents. He built the program around some of the same pedagogical tools that he would later employ at the University of Phoenix: He brought in teachers who were experts in their fields, divided the class into small groups, and challenged each group to complete a project. He was surprised when the enthusiastic students lobbied him to create degree programs. Which is exactly what he did.
Sperling sketched out a curriculum for working adults and pitched it to the academic vice president at San Jose State, who promptly slapped it down. "My university said they didn't need no more stinkin' students, that they had all they could handle," Sperling acidly recalls. "They told me to go back and behave -- be a professor." Naturally, he ignored that advice. Even though he held business in contempt -- as would any right-thinking, left-leaning humanities professor -- the marketplace intrigued him. And he sensed an enormous market for degree-based programs targeted at working adults who were anxious to take the road to higher education.
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